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From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession
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Item Description...
Product Description
Is management a profession? Should it be? Can it be? This major work of social and intellectual history reveals how such questions have driven business education and shaped American management and society for more than a century. The book is also a call for reform. Rakesh Khurana shows that university-based business schools were founded to train a professional class of managers in the mold of doctors and lawyers but have effectively retreated from that goal, leaving a gaping moral hole at the center of business education and perhaps in management itself. Khurana begins in the late nineteenth century, when members of an emerging managerial elite, seeking social status to match the wealth and power they had accrued, began working with major universities to establish graduate business education programs paralleling those for medicine and law. Constituting business as a profession, however, required codifying the knowledge relevant for practitioners and developing enforceable standards of conduct. Khurana, drawing on a rich set of archival material from business schools, foundations, and academic associations, traces how business educators confronted these challenges with varying strategies during the Progressive era and the Depression, the postwar boom years, and recent decades of freewheeling capitalism. Today, Khurana argues, business schools have largely capitulated in the battle for professionalism and have become merely purveyors of a product, the MBA, with students treated as consumers. Professional and moral ideals that once animated and inspired business schools have been conquered by a perspective that managers are merely agents of shareholders, beholden only to the cause of share profits. According to Khurana, we should not thus be surprised at the rise of corporate malfeasance. The time has come, he concludes, to rejuvenate intellectually and morally the training of our future business leaders.
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Item Specifications...
Pages 544
Binding Softcover
Release Date Apr 4, 2010
ISBN 0691145873
EAN 9780691145877
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Availability 0 units.
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Reviews - What do our customers think?
 | From Higher Aims to Hired Hands Mar 13, 2009 |
| Rakesh Khurana's book From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession has no peer. Simply put, it is the most comprehensive, probing analysis of the historical development of schools of business and business education that has ever been published. Although the author does not put forth specific recommendations to address issues raised, Professor Khurana identifies the major challenges facing contemporary business schools and describes their implications for contemporary American society. This book should be mandatory reading for every university president, and the deans and faculties of schools of business. I strongly recommend it. | | | | B-school biography tracks educational trends Feb 15, 2008 |
| This brilliant book is a sociological study of the modern business school, an ill-understood institution that has had a profound impact on the world's economy. Insider Rakesh Khurana, a professor at Harvard, begins in the late 19th century, when B-schools were born into a burgeoning America. Wharton was the first true B-school, established in 1881 with $100,000 from Joseph Wharton, a Pennsylvania Quaker. Programs at elite colleges, such as Dartmouth and Harvard, soon followed. Nasty teething pains, however, upset business schools' infancy. Academics didn't agree on curriculum or even purpose. Moreover, the nagging question about whether business (or "management") was a real profession lingered. In adolescence, the gawky B-schools looked longingly at their unquestionably legitimate, older, wealthier siblings: graduate schools for law and medicine. This led to a business-school image makeover that didn't quite work, according to the author, leaving today's B-schools facing mid-life anomie as the economic value of B-school enrollment - and the resulting M.B.A. - drops. getAbstract recommends this book to anyone who wants to understand the past and future of this influential institution. | | | | The Future of Business Schools Jan 29, 2008 |
Khurana does a superb historical review of business schools and business education. It clearly shows that one could predict a country's future 20 years ahead if you look at what business schools are teaching at the time. " Tell me what you are teaching in B Schools and I will tell you how your economy will fare in the future'. Seems obvious but no one has done this type of analysis before.
Khurana also shows how americas center-left was instrumental in creating MBAS and a socially responsible business leader, a move we have shifted away since 1970 when "agency theory" got a foothold in Wall Street. A must read. | | | | Excellent Book! Nov 30, 2007 |
| I am attending the Keller Graduate School of Management of DeVry University and I forwarded the title of this book to both my professor and the center dean. I am currently pursuing a dual Masters (MBA/MPM) so this book is of particular interest to me in regards to the author's views of the graduate business schools and the MBA programs. This is a big book (500 pages) so there is a lot of information to digest. I fully agree with his assertion that graduate business schools are loosing touch with corporate America to an extent. The major brand name schools (Harvard, Stanford, etc...) only appear to graduate MBA students with needed connections. When it comes to business education, there is a chasm between what is taught and what is needed in the marketplace. I had a cousin who graduated from HBS and hated the 2 year MBA experience but only pushed to graduate for the networks and the "Harvard" reputation. She learned nothing of the experience. The adage: "it is not what you know but who you know" is correct for these brand schools. When it comes to my experience with Keller, I fully disagree. Keller Graduate school teaches a lot of management practical material as well as theory and so far I have learned a lot of practical information for the business world. The case load is not all case study (as opposed to Harvard). What makes this a very good book is that if one is considering a brand b-school, don't expect to learn or make your mark. The lesser known but more practical business schools will be more advantageous (and cheaper!) | | | Write your own review about From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession
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